Ireland

Coreference resolution over semantic graphs like AMRs aims to group the graph nodes that represent the same entity. This is a crucial step for making document-level formal semantic representations. With annotated data on AMR coreference resolution, deep learning approaches have recently shown great potential for this task, yet they are usually data hungry and annotating data is costly. We propose a general pretraining method using variational graph autoencoder (VGAE) for AMR coreference resolution, which can leverage any general AMR corpus and even automatically parsed AMR data. Experiments on benchmarks show that the pretraining approach achieves performance gains of up to 6% absolute F1 points. Moreover, our model significantly improves on the previous state-of-the-art model by up to 11% F1 points.

ACL 2022

Variational Graph Autoencoding as Cheap Supervision for AMR Coreference Resolution

graph models

coreference resolution

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

poster

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

A long-term goal of AI research is to build intelligent agents that can communicate with humans in natural language, perceive the environment, and perform real-world tasks. Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a fundamental and interdisciplinary research topic towards this goal, and receives increasing attention from natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, and machine learning communities. 
In this paper, we review contemporary studies in the emerging field of VLN, covering tasks, evaluation metrics, methods, etc. Through structured analysis of current progress and challenges, we highlight the limitations of current VLN and opportunities for future work. This paper serves as a thorough reference for the VLN research community.

Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions

This paper analyzes negation in eight popular corpora spanning six natural language understanding tasks. We show that these corpora have few negations compared to general-purpose English, and that the few negations in them are often unimportant. Indeed, one can often ignore negations and still make the right predictions. Additionally, experimental results show that state-of-the-art transformers trained with these corpora obtain substantially worse results with instances that contain negation, especially if the negations are important. We conclude that new corpora accounting for negation are needed to solve natural language understanding tasks when negation is present.

An Analysis of Negation in Natural Language Understanding Corpora

Deep learning sequence models have been successful with morphological inflection generation. The SIGMORPHON shared task results in the past several years indicate that such models can perform well, but only if the training data covers a good amount of different lemmata, or if the lemmata to be inflected at test time have also been seen in training, as has indeed been largely the case in these tasks. Surprisingly, we find that standard models such as the Transformer almost completely fail at generalizing inflection patterns when trained on a limited number of lemmata and asked to inflect previously unseen lemmata---i.e. under ``wug test''-like circumstances. This is true even though the actual number of training examples is very large. While established data augmentation techniques can be employed to alleviate this shortcoming by introducing a copying bias through hallucinating synthetic new word forms using the alphabet in the language at hand, our experiment results show that, to be more effective, the hallucination process needs to pay attention to substrings of syllable-like length rather than individual characters.

Can a Transformer Pass the Wug Test? Tuning Copying Bias in Neural Morphological Inflection Models

We consider the problem of pretraining a two-stage open-domain question answering (QA) system (retriever + reader) with strong transfer capabilities. The key challenge is how to construct a large amount of high-quality question-answer-context triplets without task-specific annotations. Specifically, the triplets should align well with downstream tasks by: (i) covering a wide range of domains (for open-domain applications), (ii) linking a question to its semantically relevant context with supporting evidence (for training the retriever), and (iii) identifying the correct answer in the context (for training the reader). Previous pretraining approaches generally fall short of one or more of these requirements. In this work, we automatically construct a large-scale corpus that meets all three criteria by consulting millions of references cited within Wikipedia. The well-aligned pretraining signals benefit both the retriever and the reader significantly. Our pretrained retriever leads to 2%-10% absolute gains in top-20 accuracy. And with our pretrained reader, the entire system improves by up to 4% in exact match.

C-MORE: Pretraining to Answer Open-Domain Questions by Consulting Millions of References

Annotation errors that stem from various sources are usually unavoidable when performing large-scale annotation of linguistic data. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of using the Transformer model to detect various types of annotator errors in type-based morphological datasets that contain inflected word forms. We evaluate our error detection model on four languages by injecting three different types of artificial errors into the data: (1) typographic errors, where single characters in the data are inserted, replaced, or deleted; (2) linguistic confusion errors where two inflected forms are systematically swapped; and (3) self-adversarial errors where the Transformer model itself is used to generate plausible-looking, but erroneous forms by retrieving high-scoring predictions from a Transformer search beam. Results show that the model can with perfect, or near-perfect recall detect errors in all three scenarios, even when significant amounts of the annotated data (5%-30%) are corrupted on all languages tested. Precision varies across the languages and types of errors, but is high enough that the model can reliably be used to flag suspicious entries in large datasets for further scrutiny by human annotators.

Detecting Annotation Errors in Morphological Data with the Transformer

Reasoning using negation is known to be difficult for transformer-based language models. While previous studies have used the tools of psycholinguistics to probe a transformer's ability to reason over negation, none have focused on the types of negation studied in developmental psychology. We explore how well transformers can process such categories of negation, by framing the problem as a natural language inference (NLI) task. We curate a set of diagnostic questions for our target categories from popular NLI datasets and evaluate how well a suite of models reason over them. We find that models perform consistently better only on certain categories, suggesting clear distinctions in how they are processed.

Developmental Negation Processing in Transformer Language Models

Several methods have been proposed for classifying long textual documents using Transformers. However, there is a lack of consensus on a benchmark to enable a fair comparison among different approaches. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the relative efficacy measured against various baselines and diverse datasets --- both in terms of accuracy as well as time and space overheads. Our datasets cover binary, multi-class, and multi-label classification tasks and represent various ways information is organized in a long text (e.g. information that is critical to making the classification decision is at the beginning or toward the end of the document). Our results show that more complex models often fail to outperform simple baselines and yield inconsistent performance across datasets. These findings emphasize the need for future studies to consider comprehensive baselines and datasets that better represent the task of long document classification to develop robust models.

Efficient Classification of Long Documents Using Transformers

Shannon entropy is often a quantity of interest to linguists studying the communicative capacity of human language. However, entropy
must typically be estimated from observed data because researchers do not have access to the underlying probability distribution. While entropy estimation is a well-studied problem in other fields, there is not yet a comprehensive exploration of the efficacy of entropy estimators for use with linguistic data. In this work, we fill this void, studying the empirical effectiveness of different entropy estimators for linguistic distributions. In a replication of two recent information-theoretic linguistic studies, we find evidence that the reported effect size is over-estimated due to over-reliance on poor entropy estimators. We end this paper with a concrete recommendation for the entropy estimators that should be used in future linguistic studies.

Estimating the Entropy of Linguistic Distributions

Comprehending a dialogue requires a model to capture diverse kinds of key information in the utterances, which are either scattered around or implicitly implied in different turns of conversations. Therefore, dialogue comprehension requires diverse capabilities such as paraphrasing, summarizing, and commonsense reasoning. Towards the objective of pre-training a zero-shot dialogue comprehension model, we develop a novel narrative-guided pre-training strategy that learns by narrating the key information from a dialogue input. However, the dialogue-narrative parallel corpus for such a pre-training strategy is currently unavailable. For this reason, we first construct a dialogue-narrative parallel corpus by automatically aligning movie subtitles and their synopses. We then pre-train a BART model on the data and evaluate its performance on four dialogue-based tasks that require comprehension. Experimental results show that our model not only achieves superior zero-shot performance but also exhibits stronger fine-grained dialogue comprehension capabilities.

Learning-by-Narrating: Narrative Pre-Training for Zero-Shot Dialogue Comprehension

Effectively finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) is critical for their success in downstream tasks. However, PLMs may have risks in overfitting pretraining signals, and there are some gaps between downstream tasks and the pretraining tasks. It can be difficult for vanilla finetuning methods to overcome the barrier between pretraining and downstream tasks, which leads to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a very simple yet effective method named NoisyTune which can help better finetune PLMs in downstream tasks by adding some noise to the parameters of PLMs before finetuning. More specifically, we propose a matrix-wise perturbing method by adding different uniform noises according to the standard deviations of different parameter matrices, which can consider the varied characteristics of different types of parameters in PLMs. Extensive experiments on the GLUE English benchmark and the XTREME multilingual benchmark show that NoisyTune can consistently improve the performance of different PLMs in many downstream tasks.

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Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions

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